Sweetgrass

Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 101 min, 35mm. (2009)

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

Sweetgrass premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. It has since played at the New York Film Festival, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, and AFI Festival, among others.

A really intimate, beautifully shot examination of the connection between man and beast…” —Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A one-of-a-kind experience. At once epic-scale and earthbound” —Ronnie Scheib, Variety.

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